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Blog: Lower total costs with chamber optimization

Our goal in chamber optimization is to improve the performance of the crusher, crushing chamber and wear parts. When the chamber works in an optimal way, it protects the crusher against overloads and premature wear of the main components. My experience is that chamber optimization is a great service that reduces the total cost of operation

Maximized uptime and reduced cost per ton

Our customers are looking for ways to reduce the cost of their production and equipment maintenance. We can help them in this by optimizing the crusher chamber.

The main target in many optimization projects is to increase the lifetime of wear parts, which directly reduces the cost per ton. One of the keys to maximizing production is to ensure that the crusher uptime is high. A longer lifetime of wear parts means fewer service breaks and higher availability of the crusher. Less service work also increases safety, a factor that is very important to us and to our customers. This reduces total operating costs.

Every crushing application is different, so there is potential for improvement by customizing the design of wear parts. If the crushing chamber is not working optimally, there are many negative consequences. For instance, energy can be wasted to slipping/sliding and “boiling” rather than actual crushing. Sliding also accelerates the wear of wear parts. Power spikes can overload the crusher and its components and, in the worst case, cause breakage of a main component. Excess fatigue loads shorten the designed lifetime of a main component.

Valuable experience

Metso has designed and manufactured crushers for decades. As the one creating the specs for the crusher, we know its functional parameters, forces, mechanics and kinematics – crucial knowledge in order to be able to optimize the chamber. We started offering the crusher chamber optimization service in response to customers asking us to help optimize wear life and performance in order to bring production-related costs down. For us, it was an easy decision to put our expertise and knowledge to good use to help our customers reach their goals.

Today we have a global dedicated crusher wears engineering team for chamber optimization. Over the years, we have developed our own CAD-based chamber and crushing simulation software, and that gives us valuable information during the engineering process. We can actually make changes and simulate how the changes will impact chamber performance in detail and the impact on output product gradation before making a decision on the chamber design.

Close collaboration with our customers

The whole crushing process is taken into consideration when we do a chamber optimization. We start by collecting all the necessary data. We then work with the customer to define the development targets. When the data is analyzed and the engineering completed, we manufacture all the wear parts in our own foundry; every step of the manufacturing process is specifically developed for our wear parts.

Chamber optimization is typically a longer term process involving close collaboration with our customer. We make the necessary development steps while always aiming for a reduced cost per ton. Optimization is about more than just the design of the wear parts: we also carefully select the right materials that will provide the best performance for every specific application.